Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Western Civilization

This introductory chapter first considers the concept of human nature, raising questions such as how human nature and nature as such are related, and how are both related to person. It then turns to what the Jewish tradition says about human nature. It sets out the book's focus, namely a dialogue between contemporary perspectives and traditional Jewish thoughts on human nature. Both sides have something to gain from the dialogue; both have something to lose from shunning it. Judaism risks intellectual irrelevance by failing to engage with the challenges of contemporary thought. Contemporary thought risks attenuating its moral seriousness if it ignores one of the sources of Western civilization. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Persons Together

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Image Of God ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Market Relations ◽  
The Image Of God

This chapter moves into the political and economic aspects of human nature. Given scarcity and interdependence, what sense has Judaism made of the material well-being necessary for human flourishing? What are Jewish attitudes toward prosperity, market relations, labor, and leisure? What has Judaism had to say about the political dimensions of human nature? If all humans are made in the image of God, what does that original equality imply for political order, authority, and justice? In what kinds of systems can human beings best flourish? It argues that Jewish tradition shows that we act in conformity with our nature when we elevate, improve, and sanctify it. As co-creators of the world with God, we are not just the sport of our biochemistry. We are persons who can select and choose among the traits that comprise our very own natures, cultivating some and weeding out others.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Cefalu
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Synoptic Gospels ◽  
Fourth Gospel ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Saint John ◽  
Pauline Theology

The introductory chapter argues that, during the early modern period in England, the Fourth Gospel and First Epistle of Saint John the Evangelist were as influential as Pauline theology and, in many respects, more influential than the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The chapter outlines several features of a distinctive, post-Reformed, English Johannine devotionalism: a high Christology that emphasizes the divine rather than human nature of Christ; the belief that salvation is achieved more through revelation than objective atonement and expiatory sin; a realized eschatology according to which eternal life has been achieved and the end-time has already partially arrived; a robust doctrine of assurance and comfort, usually tied to Johannine eschatology and pneumatology; and a stylistic and rhetorical approach to representing these theological features that often emulates John’s mode of discipleship misunderstanding and irony not found to a comparable degree in the Synoptic writings.

Introduction: The Need for New Answers

Metamorphosis ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Roman Poet ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Inside Out

This introductory chapter argues that legally sanctioned theories of retribution have allowed vindictiveness to flourish everywhere in sentencing and penal systems. The established forms of punishment are elemental in two senses of the word. First, they are near reflexes in thought. Second, in their intractability, they explain why a new approach must correct mistreatment in a broken system. Only transformation in the forms themselves, change from the inside out, can answer these problems. The chapter cites and agrees with the Roman poet Ovid's concept of metamorphosis for two reasons. It agrees that punishment must seek a more balanced transformation, and it argues that a better understanding of human nature in its active parts can adjust that balance toward healing instead of hurting.

Human Nature & Jewish Thought

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
Jewish Philosophy ◽  
The Many

This book explores one of the great questions of our time: How can we preserve our sense of what it means to be a person while at the same time accepting what science tells us to be true—namely, that human nature is continuous with the rest of nature? What, in other words, does it mean to be a person in a world of things? This book shows how the Jewish tradition provides rich ways of understanding human nature and personhood that preserve human dignity and distinction in a world of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, biotechnology, and pervasive scientism. These ancient resources can speak to Jewish, non-Jewish, and secular readers alike. Science may tell us what we are, the book says, but it cannot tell us who we are, how we should live, or why we matter. Traditional Jewish thought, in open-minded dialogue with contemporary scientific perspectives, can help us answer these questions. The book shows how, using sources ranging across the Jewish tradition, from the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud to more than a millennium of Jewish philosophy. Among the many subjects the book addresses are sexuality, birth and death, violence and evil, moral agency, and politics and economics. Throughout, the book demonstrates how Jewish tradition brings new perspectives to—and challenges many current assumptions about—these central aspects of human nature. A study of human nature in Jewish thought and an original contribution to Jewish philosophy, this is a book for anyone interested in what it means to be human in a scientific age.

The Human Age

Human Forms ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Ian Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Technical Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Specialist Knowledge ◽  
Discourse Modeling

This introductory chapter discusses how the novel, the ascendant imaginative form in nineteenth-century Europe, did more than broadcast the anthropological turn of secular knowledge: it helped steer it and—under the license of fiction—it pressed it to its limits. As the history of man broke up among competing disciplinary claims on scientific authority after 1800, the novel took over as its universal discourse, modeling the new developmental conception of human nature as a relation between the history of individual persons and the history of the species. The novel's supposed aesthetic disability, its lack of form, now marked its fitness to model the changing form of man. Novels could offer a comprehensive representation of human life—a Human Comedy—in a general writing accessible to all readers, mediated not by specialist knowledge or technical language but by the shared sensibilities that constitute “our common nature.” Thus, novels became active instruments in the ongoing scientific revolution, advancing its experimental postulates that human nature may not be one but many, that humans share their nature with other creatures, that humans have no nature, that the human form is variable, fluid, fleeting—as well as developing a technical practice, realism, to defend humanity's place at the center of nature and at the end of history.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Evolutionary Perspective ◽  
Human Lineage ◽  
World War ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
Second World

This introductory chapter offers a quick glimpse into the historical milieu during which this volume is set. Between the Second World War and the 1970s, this chapter shows that scientists from a wide range of disciplines crafted a historical trajectory for humanity that was self-consciously anti-eugenic. The best of humanity had not degenerated from living in the artificial constructs of civilization, would not dissolve because of the overbreeding of the lower classes, and could not be corrupted through miscegenation. Instead, these evolutionists argued that our common past provided evidence of our continued remarkable success as a species. In essence, so these scientists reasoned, our present human nature resulted from the synergy of biology and culture, both in dynamic flux throughout our development as a species. We had become the most recent manifestation of a human lineage destined for even greater things in the future. Through their work, an evolutionary perspective wended its way into each discipline perched at the intersection of the natural and social sciences.

scholarly journals Introduction

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-18
Author(s):  
Józef Maria Ruszar ◽  
Andrzej Wadas
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Middle School ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Dante Alighieri ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Objective Truth ◽  
The Divine Comedy ◽  
Universal Values

The year 2021 has come exactly 700 years after the death of Dante Alighieri, one of the greatest authors of world literature. The Polish Classical, Romantic and Catholic traditions had been drawing from his works by the handful, and especially from the Divine Comedy. Dante was near and dear to many generations of our ancestors, accompanying them on the various levels of education, throughout middle school, high school and university. For the learning youth, he was a mentor and teacher who presented human nature in its all dimensions, from atrocity to heroism and holiness. In times of confusion that we are living through, when not only as individuals and communities, but as the entire Western civilization we have found ourselves in the “dark woods” (una selva oscura) to be preyed upon by the three beasts (le tre fiere): pride, greed and lust, Dante remains a beacon and inspiration for all those who believe that there is an objective truth and universal values that apply to all people regardless of race, nationality or social status.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Nicolas Langlitz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Nonhuman Primates ◽  
Biological Diversity ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Modern Humans ◽  
Cultural Primatology ◽  
The 1950S

This introductory chapter provides a background of the ensuing controversy over chimpanzee culture. Japanese and Euro-American primatologists have come to question whether humans are the only primates capable of culture — that is, whether culture amounts to human nature. In the 1950s, Japanese primatologists around Kinji Imanishi proposed to attribute “subhuman culture” — or kaluchua, as they called it — to nonhuman primates. In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, a growing number of European and American primatologists and evolutionary anthropologists chimed in with Japanese anthropomorphism and wondered how unique the cultural nature of Homo sapiens really was. Just as cultural anthropologists have struggled to account for the loss of cultural diversity during five centuries of Euro-American domination (currently on the wane), cultural primatology is now confronted with the question of how to make sense of the eradication of nonhuman cultural and biological diversity in light of modern humans' savage success.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face

This concluding chapter returns to the theme of the worth or dignity of human life. What are the implications, in the face of the contemporary challenges of biotechnology and scientistic materialism, of a Jewish understanding of human nature and human dignity for our common human future? It argues that the ambivalence of the Jewish tradition toward human nature is an attitude well worth cultivating. We are holy—and capable of unimaginable evil. Judaism reminds us of both. We have the creativity and freedom to remake the world, and now, increasingly, to remake ourselves. Our own survival might depend on cultivating anew a sense of limits. Limits there will always be, many imposed by human nature. Our dignity inheres in knowing when and how to master them, and when and how to accept them with respect.

scholarly journals Rationality’s Confrontation with Irrationality-A Philosophical Thought About Tender Is the Night

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Lingmin Zhou
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Western World ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Tender Is The Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night vividly presents us a picture of western world in 1917-1930. In the book, Dick’s fall, incestuous behaviors and war’s effects on people all show that western world is occupied by irrationality and rationality is confronted with irrationality. This phenomenon arouses us to rethink about western civilization, even human nature and hurries us to best ourselves.

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